 Something we always have in our kitchen is a ground meat of some kind, whether it's chicken, beef, pork, turkey. It fits our style of cooking perfectly, reheats great for meal prep. And over the past couple of years, we've started making it at home. It's surprisingly easy to make, it's very cost effective, and it gives us complete control over what fat percentage we want and what goes into it or does not go into it. Like, do you actually know what's in your extra lean ground beef? Well, now you will. In this video, I'll show you what cuts of beef to buy, whether you use chicken breast or thighs or break down an entire chicken. And I'll show you three methods to do it, whether it's using a knife, a meat grinder, or a food processor. And by the end of this video, you'll be a ground proteins pro. Let's start with chicken. I think it's the easiest to grasp. You don't have to worry about which cut to buy or which are the leanest. You can just go with chicken breast or boneless skinless chicken thighs or a blend of the two. I like to use a blend when I'm looking to get a bit more fat in my ground chicken for things like meatballs or burgers. We're not talking a lot of fat, still probably 93, 95% lean or better. Chicken breast works perfectly fine on its own. And if you're making something like the knife method, chicken breast is honestly a bit easier. You don't have to worry about connective tissue or fat or anything like that. While you could buy and break down an entire chicken for the most economical option, I think it's a bit more work than I'm after. And I don't necessarily want to use all the leg meat and wings and things like that. So I just like buying either chicken breast or thighs or both in bulk. I find you can get them really cheap and in really big packages with places like Costco or Sam's. And in case you're wondering about turkey, you could totally use turkey breast in place of chicken. Treat it just like every other meat in this video and make your own ground turkey. Let's move on to the other white meat, which is actually red meat, pork. Pork is another easy one because you can just go with pork loin or pork tenderloin. With your red meat, so you'll see this with pork and beef, you will want to trim some of the excess fat on the exterior. And underneath that fat, there might be a layer of silver skin. You'll see this kind of silver bluish hue tint and that's just not really going to break down in cooking. Even when you're grinding this into small pieces, your ground pork or beef will be better if you remove that silver skin first. Helps to have like a sharp, flexible knife here. Just be careful, get as much off as possible. You can buy, especially pork tenderloin, you'll see where it's been trimmed pretty much entirely and is good to go straight out of the package. But for your most economical cuts, you'll see things like this whole pork loin and just do a bit of trimming before you slice it. Grind it. Moving on to beef, this is where things get a bit more complicated. There are so many different cuts and different butchers and grocers call different cuts different things. So what do you look for when you're trying to make extra lean ground beef? There are four primary cuts you can look for. I have round roast, top and bottom roast and sirloin. If you see these words, you're probably looking at a leaner cut of beef. You will want to look for roasts or the big chunks of meat to make this the most budget-friendly and economical choice. There are leaner cuts of steak, like flank steak, for instance, that you probably just want to leave for making carne asada instead of going to the trouble to grinding it. You'll also want to pay attention to the grade of the beef. So select and choice cuts will have far less marbling and intramuscular fat than a grade like prime. If you're looking for the most marbling and the fattiest, juiciest cut of steak or beef, go with prime. But for making extra lean ground beefs, select and choice are the way to go. And they're much cheaper than prime cuts. Let's kick things off with my preferred method and that's a meat grinder. I'll be honest, when I first purchased a meat grinder, I wasn't sure if the investment would be worth it. How often am I really going to grind my own meat? How difficult is it to clean this thing? And I've been so impressed, money well spent. This is the stainless steel kitchen aid attachment. So if you or the cook in your house has a stand mixer, I think you can get this for 100, 120 bucks, something like that. Of course you can use a standalone meat grinder, but this is the only meat grinder I have experience with so it's the only one I can recommend. This is my preferred method because it just makes the most uniform ground meat. You can control with the little different rings, the grind consistency or size. So if you want really thick grind, you can do that. If you want it really fine for something like sausages or even meatballs, whatever, you can do that as well. Usually go somewhere right in the middle. It's really hard to beat this. It's super easy. You just cut your meat, whether you're using chicken pork, beef, whatever, into chunks that can fit through the meat feeder, whatever the hole is called on the top. Just feed it through, push it down. Of course, keep your fingers away from any moving parts. And I mean, it is just so easy. Look at it. So let's say you don't have a meat grinder. You have no interest in adding one to your kitchen. That's totally cool. My second favorite method is just using a knife. All you need to do is freeze your protein for about 30 minutes. You don't want it frozen rock solid, but freezing will make it firm enough to slice and really help you out there. I will say this method is not going to be perfect for things like meatballs, burgers, anything where you need to form the protein. It's just gonna be a little difficult to get this very fine and very even. This will be best for one pan dishes where you're making like with a sauce, say firecracker chicken, or you're making a stir fry and you want really small pieces so they cook evenly and quick and reheat well. That's gonna be your best application for this. I will say chicken breast is the easiest followed by pork loin and tenderloin. When you get into beef and even chicken thighs to a certain degree, you kind of get some connective tissue and marbling and fat and some odd pieces where it's probably best to run that through the meat grinder or a food processor. And last but possibly least, at least my least favorite method of the bunch is a food processor. A food processor is the easiest way to go. Most people have a food processor. You just throw the meat in, barely chop it and just give it eight to 10 pulses depending on your food processor. It is easy, but the product you're left with is kind of imperfect in a lot of ways. You may still want to run it through the food processor and then kind of like hit it with a knife. I think maybe that's the best of both worlds because you kind of do get some stringy textures. It almost looks like you Wolverine went at this and just kind of like hand-treaded it. It's fine, you know, it's fine and it gets the job done. If you look at it in like a side-by-side comparison, you can get it a bit finer grind than you can with a knife. Like I said, it's easier, bonus points and it cooks all the same. And a lot of times you're really hammering this with a spatula anyway, so you could break up parts of that stringiness or parts that don't fully get blended in or mixed in. So the food processor, like I said, the easiest, imperfect, just probably depends on what you're using it for, similar to the knife. Okay, to wrap things up, let's talk about storage. If you're grinding your own meat, I highly recommend doing it in bulk, five, 10 plus pounds at a time just to maximize your effort and cleanup. If you're doing that, unless you have a massive family or a massive appetite, you're not gonna eat it all. So I recommend storing in plastic bags, Ziploc bags, vacuum seal bags are great and freezing. If you want precise measurements, I would weigh things out or at least know your starting weight of the meat so you don't have to calculate your yield later and then divide this out, package it up. I like to put it in flat, kind of like form it into flat bricks. I guess you could call them, that way they're stackable in the freezer. And then when you're ready to cook, I would just set these out. I would kind of package based on how you plan to cook. If you're a cook one pound at a time type of person, maybe you package one at a time. We typically do two pounds, so you're seeing about two pounds here per bag. You know, plan accordingly, you can of course thaw this, like transfer it from your freezer to your refrigerator and take out half and cook one to two pounds and then it's gonna be fine in the refrigerator for a few days after it thaws. So you don't have to cook it all at once as it thaws. And yeah, I think that's everything you need to know about grinding your own meat. At least that's pretty much everything I know to tell you about grinding your own meat. I may have forgotten something. Oh, one big important thing would be recipes. I have probably 200 plus, I don't know, 300 plus recipes with ground beef, ground chicken, turkey, pork. You name it, like homemade chorizo, stir fries. Got all the sauces. You can do all kinds of stuff with this. Meatballs, burgers, you name it. I will link down in the description below some of my categories so you can kind of sort through and pick out things you might wanna make with ground meats. But I'm guessing if you watched this video and you made it to this point, you know what you're doing. If you liked this video and you made it to the end and you haven't liked or subscribed already, hit those buttons and we'll see you in the next video.